what's going on everyone, here back with a brand new episode of iran tech, today i'm at hondab, a cityan's 20-year vision document for its nuclear program and the main source of income for iran's nuclear program uh thanks to the extremely high quality. heavy water that is produced here and is exported to all the trees that require heavy water, so join me on this journey as we talk about how heavy water is made, its significance and its importance to iran's nuclear program uh as well as a couple of other isotopes that are also made in this facility. so first of all, what even is heavy water and why do we need such a massive facility be able to get it? heavy water is put simply water with very high concentration of deuterium. what is deuterium? deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. an isotope of any element is uh that element with a different number of neutrons. hydrogen typically has one single neutron. deuterium is hydrogen with two neutrons so one additional neutron which makes it heavier, hence the name heavy water. so uh, you pretty much know the chemical formula of water, it's h2oh

facilities like hondab are essential for producing stabili isobes like oxygen 18. the process starts with regular water containing various oxygen isotopes. using fractional distillation, water is heated and cooled repeatedly. since oxygen 18 has higher boiling point, it concentrates in the remaining liquid phase. another method is electrolysis, where water is split into hydrogen in oxygen gases. lighter oxygen 16 favors electrolysis, leaving behind. enriched in oxygen 18, enriched oxygen 18 is then extracted and purified, it's used in pet scans for medical diagnostics and an environmental science to study water sources and climate change. heavy water facilities thus play a crucial role in providing this valuable isotope for diverse applications. so now you know how heavy water is produced, now there's an infinite. of things that we can do with this heavy water and more specifically with the deuterium within this heavy water. i'm going to tell you about one of the use cases here uh, but we're definitely going to have to cover all of these use cases or at least parts